David Oranchak, owner of the Zodiac Killer Ciphers website, gave a very interesting and informative presentation on the Zodiac ciphers at the Cryptologic History Symposium on October 22nd 2015. If you want to discover some of the features and quirks regarding the composition of the ciphers, this is an extremely good place to start. But there was one particular section that peaked my interest, despite the fact it would probably contradict a number of articles I have featured on this site. Nevertheless, I would like to present the part of the Cryptologic History Symposium here, using the words of David Oranchak. In the video, beginning at 34:37, David states "Here's an interesting coincidence. If you take two standard sized pieces of paper, 8 1/2 inches wide by 11 inches in length and you divide the paper into equal half inch squares, you end up with these sheets that have 17 columns and 22 rows. If you write both ciphers (the 340 and 408) back to back, you end up filling both sheets exactly with no leftover squares. It is an interesting coincidence. Does it mean that Zodiac drafted both of his ciphers together on two sheets of paper? It's an interesting question".

It certainly is an interesting question, bearing in mind the difficulty experienced in solving the 50-year-old 340 cipher and the still unsolved 18 characters at the foot of the 408 cipher. The Zodiac Killer stated in the 408 cipher, preceding the final 18 characters, that "I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife".If the unsolved section of the 408 cipher didn't contain his name or identity, is it possible these 18 characters were supposed to bleed into the message on the 340 cipher. This has to a realistic proposition when we consider the 340 cipher begins with the final three letters of the word cipher. Was this just another coincidence - or did each cryptogram share half of the word cipher, as well as sharing a message? It is a compelling argument that the Zodiac Killer may have intended to leave only 12 unsolved characters at the foot of the first cipher (possibly decoding to "I am the Zodiac"), but the accidental omission of the word people from the message may have resulted in an unwanted extra 6 characters, thereby forcing a change of plan. Could the 18 characters now form part of a 21 character bridge (or more) between cipher one and two? The 408 cipher ending with cip and joining the her of the yet to be released 340 cipher. If the remainder of the 408 cipher and beginning of the 340 cipher was somehow conveying the idea of "sorry no cipher", in similar fashion to the October 27th 1970 'Halloween' card, then the message on the November 8th 1969 greeting card stating "I thought you would need a good laugh before you hear the bad news", may be pertinent to the cipher that accompanied it.

Sorry no cipher written on the Halloween card once would have sufficed, to inform us that no code was present on the greeting card, yet the Zodiac Killer appeared to fashion it to mimic the Paradice and Slaves configuration on the card, which equally mimicked the possibility shown present in the 340 cipher on the right. This configuration perfectly bisected the 340 cipher (17 by 17) both horizontally and vertically.

By extension, from the Halloween card to the 340 cipher, was the Zodiac Killer telling us that the second cryptogram was "sorry no cipher"? And by extension, was the Zodiac Killer telling us exactly the same thing from the 408 cipher to the 340 cipher, hence the tantalizing her at the beginning of the cryptogram. It could be argued that the placement of her at the beginning and the near-Zodiac towards the end, is a little too convenient. A message of "sorry no cipher" through three sets of communications may be a bit difficult to shake off as coincidental.

If the Zodiac Killer created a rambling message akin to the 408 cipher and randomly allotted his cipher key, then he was extremely unfortunate to have crafted the possibility of the configuration on the right, involving the words paradice and slaves, by in each quadrant, with her at the beginning and Zodaik near the end. This is not what you want to achieve when you are trying to convince the world it's a genuine cipher, because people like me come along. The prospect of finding the same mini-message shared between the 408 and 340 cipher, that was found on the envelope inner of the Halloween card would certainly be "bad news" for some.

I would like to thank David Oranchak for his contribution regarding the Cryptologic History Symposium, and would encourage everybody who is interested in ciphers to click the highlighted link. Below is just one rudimentary example I have drummed together, using a screenshot of the Youtube video, keeping 7 of the 21 characters in their original format.

I find it odd that FBI Head Crypto expert Dan Olson (sitting on left) who appeared in 2009 SF Slaughter Doc with his line 11 to 13 theory had no updates on the Z ciphers.

Maybe History channel docs can squeeze info from LE.

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Richard

8/5/2019 01:21:13 am

I have seen little to back up his theory, other than the 10th line was the cut-off point in a possible fragmented cipher. There are many strange features in the 340 cipher compared to the 408. I know ciphers vary, but the 408 is pretty unremarkable compared to one 68 characters less.

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Tom1

8/5/2019 05:24:25 am

The 340 is probably a word puzzle and therefore not solvable by the traditional methods applicable to decoding a cipher. An overlay is required to reveal the operative symbols, which then must be decoded. The final step required is to assemble the symbols into a coherent statement.

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Richard

8/6/2019 03:05:42 pm

Yes Tom, I certainly believe its a puzzle involving words and hidden messages, but rudimentary in nature. I doubt the rambling message akin to the 408 notion. "Sorry no cipher" and "I'm crackproof" a sign of Zodiac's assertion it couldn't be broken? Possibly.

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Roger

8/7/2019 07:40:52 pm

I have often tossed the coin, so to speak, in hope that the two ciphers are merely two sides of the same coin. Or perhaps one cipher was intended to complement the other? There are certainly patterns and pivots on comparison, and lots of odd little coincidences, which were either intentional or the result of pure chance. Really we can make of such things whatever we wish and therein lies the problem. The jury is still out on the 340. We cannot prove it is fake any more than we can prove it is real, and we can merely speculate on any intended "message" it may contain. The Zodiac of course probably knew this in advance.

Some claim that without question they have solved the 340 cipher, but they are either very deluded or have a very poor grasp of cryptography.

As for it being a mere word puzzle, this probably amounts to wishful thinking more than anything. A word puzzle would have to represent a huge deterioration in the Zodiac's skill set, who was most likely out to impress the experts at the time. To my thinking, the only way he could impress the crypto experts would be to up his skill set from a simple homophonic cipher to something far more complex... or, to fake it. Just as we saw with the bus bomb, when he failed to bring his complex theoretical design to fruition, he promptly abandoned the idea and moved on to other topics. The bus bomb was a dud, which he freely admitted, but only "after the fact", because the bomb, whether real or imagined, had served its function of taunting the police and scaring the public. So a word puzzle only seems plausible to me if we consider he may have "window-dressed" a fake cipher with a few seemingly realistic word placements which serve to keep people dangling on the hook forever.

There is often little logic in the activities of crazy people, but it does seem likely that if his intention was merely to waste the time of authorities, he would fake the cipher too. Then he could sit back laughing and make claims like "What? Still haven't solved it? I must be uncrackable. Hahaha! I can see you need help, so here's another obscure clue to keep you guessing."

All I know is that looking for a link between that stupid Phillips road map and using a compass and radians to discover a so-called "Mt Diablo code" is an entirely fruitless activity. The Zodiac might as well have called it the "Mars code" and sent them a star chart that he'd cut out of a magazine. It would have been just as theatrical and nonsensical.

Nevertheless, based on properties and statistics, the 340 contains elements which are highly suggestive of a real cipher. These are things that a purely random or deliberately faked cipher would not normally have. The Zodiac did say that the "devil is in the detail" which makes me wonder if there is still some detail in the encryption that we everyone has been overlooking. It is possible that he did something to this cipher out of desperation, anger, or insanity. So the encryption method he used may have been very atypical or insane.

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